SOURCE: Stephenson, William. “Acrostic ‘FICTIO’ in Robert Henryson's The Testament of Cresseid (Lines 58-63).” Chaucer Review 29, no. 2 (1994): 163-65.

In the essay below, Stephenson suggests that the initial letters of lines 58-63 of The Testament of Cresseid intentionally form the acrostic “FICTIO,” alluding to an earlier source document for Henryson's work.

Despite the sort of literary challenge scholars normally accept with eagerness and tenacity, few have taken seriously Robert Henryson's reference to an unnamed, unknown source for the plot of his fifteenth-century Middle Scots poem The Testament of Cresseid. Critics have only rarely raised a challenge to the common assumption that, with his ambiguous reference to “ane vther quair” presenting “the fatall destenie / Of fair Cresseid,”¹ Henryson is simply following Chaucer's precedent of feigning prior authority.

James Kinsley, in a 1952 note to TLS,² argued that Henryson may have found the “germinal idea” for the Testament in G. Myll's The...